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It happens. Unexpected emergency expenses that catch you off-guard and threaten to knock you off your feet. Financial advisers strongly suggest having an Emergency Fund just for such situations, but if you’ve used your fund recently, or you are establishing it and don’t have enough saved to cover the emergency expense, or your emergency needs exceed your Emergency Fund, you could be caught in a tough spot.
Our family is experiencing this spot, this month. Unexpectedly, our sole vehicle (10 years old and 180, 000 miles) needed some serious (and of course, super-expensive) repairs. Not repairing the vehicle is not an option since we need it to go to town for various medical appointments which cannot be cancelled. Our only option was to fix the car, use what funds we had available and borrow from our budgeted expense money for the month. The most fluid expense is our food budget, so that’s where the money needed comes from first.
Starting November 1, we will live off our food and home storage, including foods, household supplies, hygiene and beauty needs. No shopping in November for us, with ONE possible exception – a pastured turkey that we ordered and will pick up 2 days before Thanksgiving. The rest of our Thanksgiving meal (and all meals in November) will come from our storage. I will suspend all my Amazon and Swanson Vitamins Subscribe and Save orders for November which include several herbal remedies which we rely on daily and toilet paper. 🙂
This is not an experiment, challenge, or dry-run. It’s real life for us and I know many of you have been in similar situations. We had no warning before this emergency, and so we did NOT run out and stock up or prepare in advance. We will live off solely what we have on hand. That’s what makes this so interesting, we will see how our regular preparations will hold up without any warning, just like in real life.
I hope you’ll check in with me as I share my No-Shopping November results and see where we’ve stored well, or where we need to store differently. Recipes will be published in subsequent posts and I plan on doing a Q & A recap at the end. Please feel free to send me your questions.
Note: Because we homeschool and we rise and sleep on a later schedule than most folks, we don’t always have Breakfast and Lunch, we combine them and have light snacks a few hours after supper. Also note, I don’t cook every day due to a disability, I batch cook and we eat leftovers quite a bit. Just in case you notice that we have the same item several times in a row.
November 1st
Kitchen:
Made 3 batches of Kombucha
Beauty and cleaning:
Used baking soda and vinegar to wash my hair
Used baking soda and vinegar in the dishwasher
Menu:
Breakfast- Scrambled eggs, bagels, organic cream cheese, organic apple juice
Lunch – Turkey sandwiches on homemade whole wheat bread, organic chips
Supper – Homemade matzah ball soup
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About Vickilynn Parnes
